Nobel Physics 2023 honors research on electrons

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier for research related to electrons inside atoms and molecules.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that scientists Pierre Agostini (55 years old), Ferenc Krausz (61 years old) and Anne L'Huillier (65 years old) are the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, thanks to their efforts. Experimental method that helps create attosecond light pulses to study electron dynamics in matter , at 4:45 p.m. on October 3 (Hanoi time).

Three scientists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, Anne L'Huillier received the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023. (Photo: CNN)

Pierre Agostini is a professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, USA. Ferenc Krausz is a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany. Anne L'Huillier is a professor at Lund University, Sweden.

Research by three scientists has demonstrated how to create extremely short pulses of light, which can be used to measure very fast processes in which electrons move or change energy. Scholars' contributions help understand processes that occur so quickly that they were previously impossible to track.

In the world of electrons, changes occur in less than an attosecond, (1 attosecond is 1×10⁻¹⁸ second - an extremely small amount of time). The scholars' experiments produced light pulses so short that they could be measured in attoseconds, demonstrating that these pulses could be used to provide snapshots of processes inside atoms and molecules.

In 1987, Anne L'Huillier discovered various resonant frequencies of light when she passed infrared laser light through an inert gas. Each resonant frequency is a light wave with a certain number of periods in the laser light. They are created by laser light interacting with atoms in the gas, providing additional energy to some electrons. This energy is then emitted as light. L'Huillier continued to explore the phenomenon and laid the foundations for future breakthroughs.

In 2001, Pierre Agostini succeeded in producing and researching a series of continuous light pulses, in which each pulse lasted only 250 attoseconds. Also during this time, Ferenc Krausz worked on another type of experiment, which made it possible to isolate a single light pulse lasting 650 attoseconds.

The contributions of this year's award-winning scientists allow the study of processes that occur so quickly that they were previously impossible to monitor.

"We can now open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand the mechanisms that electrons govern. The next step will be to use them ," said Eva Olsson, President Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said.

The research has potential applications in many different fields. One of the potential applications of electron research is in semiconductor production. Attosecond pulses can also be used to identify different molecules, for example in medical diagnostics.

The Nobel Prize in Physics is the second award announced this year, after the Nobel Prize in Biomedicine. On the afternoon of October 2, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named the research work on mRNA vaccine to prevent Covid-19 by two scientists Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for this award.

This year's Nobel Prize winner will receive a bonus of 11 million Swedish krona ($986,000), an increase of one million Swedish krona compared to 2022.

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to three scientists Alain Aspect (France), John F. Clauser (USA) and Anton Zeilinger (Austria) for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing a violation of Bell's inequality and pioneer in quantum information science.